Infinite Ground (17 page)

But she had held firm, allowing him to make the inevitable discoveries leading to the forest. It didn't seem conceivable, now, that he had been so foolish, so naive as to believe in the authenti­city of the investigation and the autonomy of his own role.

He imagined them carrying plants, quick-growing crops, cassavas, peanuts. They could establish another settlement before moving on again, always provisionally. But he was rushing ahead. He had to think carefully, realistically. They had not gone far. Chances were they were all around. There was room under the earth. It wouldn't take long to dig out pits, shafts concealed by surface turf. They could live there, assuming their provisions were in place, as long as the air held. They would be laughing at him now, under the soil.

He looked up to the swaying perimeter trees. A vertical solution, moving either above or below, was more likely than a horizontal one. It would be instant. Without having to travel, they could achieve a sudden and total vanishing.

There was something about the coffee, the meals unfinished on the café tables, that conflicted with the dirt, the evidence of the outside found in the homes. Something artificial in the picture, staged. The suggestion of recent activity in the café seemed contrived. Someone, a single individual, must have set it up, thus allowing all of the other residents to leave earlier, perhaps in the middle of the night. Hadn't he woken differently, hungrily, and with the feeling of having only just recovered? Perhaps he had slept longer than a night. Some soporific fed into his food, putting him out. The rest of them ferried away, in boats and in several light aircraft, many journeys. The single other person – he wished he could picture them – remaining, maintaining the heat of the half-drunk mugs, the appearance of freshness in the bread and the eggs, waiting for him to wake, before slipping out to join the others, wherever they were, whoever they were.

He intersected the clearing, walking absurdly, stiff joints moving his limbs awkwardly. He returned to Maria's café and took bread and fruit from the kitchen, not wanting to interfere with the meals laid out on the tables. He gulped water, sat at his usual place and tried to be calm. His reaction to the situation, the theories he was generating, proliferating, was not a positive sign. Paranoia, egomania. He would have identified the symptoms instantly in anyone else. Rationally, none of it could be true. He should do his best to ignore the current evacuation and everything would return to normal. When Santa Lucía was repopulated he would be told what had really happened and it would be remarkable, amazing, he could enjoy it. It would have been worth it.

He should continue to walk into the forest, press ahead. Acting as if nothing had changed, he would not be so surprised when he found that was the case. One day he would return and find Santa Lucía active, full of hammering and calling, food, oil and gasoline. Everything would be restored and it would be the most natural thing in the world.

He did not look forward to the night. He concentrated on food preparation and on having sufficient light. He walked cautiously and kept to his own room in the Terminación. Wind picked up after dark and he had forgotten to do his routine checks on the shutters and doors. He heard them whipping in the pre-storm breeze, clattering against the walls. He withdrew further into his own room, pleading, but he knew he couldn't stand it. He struck the lamp, dressed and left the hotel. In the dark it wasn't clear that Santa Lucía had been created. There was little suggestion of anything having been done. A town here – not even a town, a village, a temporary settlement – required a lot of work. You had to take so many things away first, day after day, making space. And now, in the dark, all the work was gone. He could not make out the clearing. He had no sense of depth. As soon as he left the hotel, he put his hands out in front of him, although he knew the path and should have been quite familiar with it, shouldn't have had to think. He expected at any moment to walk into the trees. The shutters and the doors crashed against the wood walls, startling him every time, because he saw ­nothing, he couldn't establish where they came from.

He wondered if the evacuation would be noticeable to anything else: if animals could detect the new absence of life, the plunder they could have with just him left.

He wanted to return to the hotel, to his room. But he had to close all the shutters and the doors. He had barely started. If he were to do it properly, he would be there all night, walking from one empty building to another. But it was important. He couldn't leave the place to rot. In all likelihood the residents would return soon, any minute now, after the interruption, and the buildings must be ready for them to resume their lives. He had to ensure each of the buildings remained in a fit and habitable state indefinitely. It didn't matter how impossible it sounded, how meek his efforts seemed, he had to try.

They were important places, really. He still silently apologized on the threshold of each new door he entered, each room he intruded upon. The last thing he wanted was for a child to return and find their room caved in, as if all their time living there had counted for nothing. He didn't want that sort of ­message to come across, so he continued. Everything exactly as it was, ready indefinitely.

The rain started and things dissolved faster. He chastised himself, not working harder in the day and the early evening. Especially when the wind had started picking up and it had become clear what was blowing in. He had spent too much time waiting, deferring, as if nothing would expire.

The storms these nights were so bad he could imagine nothing remaining in the morning. When he woke in his room, parted the curtains to the soft light, opened the shutters to the gentler, instructive sounds of birds calling and the forest reshaping, he was amazed. A slow fracture into light. A morning, a simple morning, was not a continuation of anything, it was wholly new and wrought. It stunned him, inexplicable.

The first thing he did daily was inspect the hotel, the largest of the buildings, for damage and infiltration. He had to prioritize. He cleared and fixed what he could, opening out the shutters and the doors to give the dampness a better chance of drying. His original idea had been to leave everything as it was for the repopulation, but then he saw how impractical that was. Food was the biggest problem, the greatest provocation to the wild. The rot, the damp mould, approached like a predator. He had no option but to burn organic things. He dug a pit and piled in what he could and what he thought would be the first to rot – old food, surplus food that he couldn't store with the generator broken, bright cotton clothes still hanging up, rows of fetid shoes arranged in lines by front doors – took matches from the café and set the pit ablaze, sizzling it in river water when he thought enough had been destroyed.

He carefully washed the plates and cups, still turning around, still expecting Maria's dismissive laughter, and positioned them on the café tables exactly as they were, just right for the follow­ing morning's meal. He wanted to be there, in the clearing, when they came, see them slip back into position at the tables, ready for food. In their absence, he would have been an ­adequate custodian.

He was still delaying, deferring. His previous weeks in Santa Lucía had been spent preparing for and investigating the prospects of a journey east, into the approximate region where the figure had been sighted. Though there was nothing now to stop him going, he had immediately, following the evacuation, established a new routine, inspecting and cleaning the buildings, sweeping the clearing of storm-spread bush and floods, preparing his food for the day, collecting and filtering water from the river. He needed to stop.

Standing just outside Maria's he looked around. He was close, so he couldn't be certain, but he thought there was a chance the settlement had changed, in however little time had passed since the evacuation. Living in it so closely, at completely the wrong scale, really, he hadn't noticed anything until now. But it had changed. The lines were no longer clear.

His food supply diminished. He should have been better at rationing. If he had really thought about it, what he would have done was eat half-artificially and half-naturally; half, that is, from the community's existing supplies and half collected from the forest. That way he could slowly and imperceptibly change the ratio in favour of wild food gathered directly by himself. The process would have taken a reasonable period of time – years even, giving him plenty of opportunity to adapt.

Now, however – and he was not really certain how long had passed, how much time – he was going to have to make a radical change in food. He needed to go further, spend longer in the forest.

He couldn't make out the sun. He hadn't found a compass in any of the buildings and in thirty minutes he was lost. He turned, facing identically bewildering views. There were few flowers in the minimal sunlight. It rained. He examined vines, huge – a foot thick and wide – when he realized it was actually a separ­ate tree, twined around the principal tree, without root in the ground. He would like to have asked Isabella: was he seeing things? Was this real? He couldn't tell if it was killing the tree and how long the process might take. But it was ruthlessly clawing, desperately shooting upwards; here, barely a mile, he reminded himself, from the settlement.

Each new day he got a little further. He lived in the settlement now only in darkness. He ate berries, roots, any soft fruit. He left earlier and returned later and the only thing limiting his progress was that he kept coming back. His legs convulsed in the night, cramped and buckled from the increasing distances of the marches.

The damp, dim forest, fat and bursting and loud, had its own light. He saw a small bird in the early evening perched upright on a branch thinner than his smallest finger. Its eyes were closed and it remained perfectly still, not reacting to his artificial presence. This was such a different form of sleeping that he wanted to laugh. When he did, the branch perceptibly but gently moved and the bird's eyes opened. He was inches away. He turned, embarrassed.

There was the grey and green melt everywhere, the fungi and the plants. Huge, wild banana fronds amazed him. Patches of low-lying mist in the morning, silver light filament. He loved these. This light was different every day, dependent on the filter of the current canopy, the cloud cover, the temperature and humidity. He saw a pile of thin sticks creating a thatched effect that reminded him of house-building; a coral snake, brilliantly bound in coloured strips, laid coiled with its fingernail-head exposed at the edge; a hole the width of a man and three foot deep, rampant, when he looked in, with black glimmering insects. Most of all he sensed peripheral activity, the sweep of cooler air in a near wing unfolding, the snaps of a mammal ascending a tree.

Verdure changed at the edges. At any one moment he could see no more than a few feet away. He tried to be aware at all times. Trees came down softly, in slowly resisted falls, one small piece at a time like shavings from a carving. He was present in a vast information exchange and he read what he could in the light. Thorns and spikes snagged at his clothing and his skin as he lost blood passing through the trees.

His instinct was to keep returning to Santa Lucía, even though it was empty and there was less of it every day. The recurrent idea, late each afternoon as he turned west again to the settlement, was that the community would reappear. He couldn't help it. The idea rang in his head like an insistent and irritating refrain.

Even walking short distances, he became infected. He came out in red blotches and at first he thought it was the air until he saw them, the red ants:
las hormigas de fuego
. He itched and burned, but when he went to wipe them, nothing was there, only the feeling of bodies walking all over him. When he broke the bites, he bled. He thought they were weaving him backwards, threading him out into a long line of numbers. Prophylactic oils rolled on to his body had little effect. In the mornings, before setting out, he would tie the lower end of his trousers in an effort to prohibit the leeches. But when they fasted they could disappear and they penetrated cloth. He forced himself to limit foot checks to one an hour, removing quantities of slugs fattened on his blood. They broke off full, hanging on leaves like ripe bruises.

He was cutting plant stems, getting water to wash the blood from his feet. He attended to a large blister irritating him between two toes. He rubbed at it, rolled a leaf to fit the groove and stop the toes touching. There was something small and white on the ground: a tiny scrap of paper, attached to a dead ant. He studied it: the paper was thin, with a loop like a lower-case, cursive ‘a'. He'd brought nothing with him and was sure no one else had been here in some time. Looking closer, he saw it was a natural emission, something that had come from the animal. The fact it was still there suggested it was fresh. He broke it off and tasted fungus. Why hadn't the ant been stripped and eaten? He knew they lived by scent, issued instructions in code, read by antennae. A decaying ant sprayed with the right pheromone would be protected by kin, like primate mothers carrying the flat fur-string of a dead infant for weeks until it all but ran to nothing; one in every ten thousand sat up, opened its eyes.

When he turned back he always felt adrenalin. He tried to suppress smiling at the thought of the repopulation. A great welcome, a celebration and a feast. His pace quickened, he pushed on. He couldn't wait to hear what everybody said. However much he was getting to enjoy collecting fruits and establishing paths, he still thrilled at the prospect of the return.

There was a certain point in the forest where the settlement, as a block structure on the edge of a clearing, became visible. He always paused there and deferred his arrival. Building up levels of anticipation until he could face it no more, he ran back to the always empty place. He marked the viewing point, tied a white handkerchief across a thick stem. The next day he stopped there, looked west, saw nothing. Twenty paces further he could see something, not obviously Santa Lucía, certainly not distinctly the flat-roofed Terminación building. He had the sense again of being watched, toyed with. Someone picking up the handkerchief and replanting it every day. He found the handkerchief again. The trees and plants were familiar; he had even, some time ago, hacked into one and the scar remained. This was the spot. Santa Lucía was getting further away.

The buildings themselves and their features – shutters, doors – shrank. The settlement was lowered into the ground. It looked like a cluster of wrecked and sunken cabins. The houses were simple affairs of plywood and wood-chip boards, resin-sealed. Corrugated iron sheets and thin concrete. The wood rotted and the nails rusted off. The lime mortar crumbled and the concrete evaporated. The few glass windows cracked and shattered under the stress of the sliding walls and sinking roofs. Lizards and birds nested and chewed holes in the gables, which fell in. Birds and rats infested what was left of the kitchens. He stood in what had been the clearing and tried to see it happen, the live disintegration of this place, but all he saw were the effects. Plants took root in the moist fabric of beds and pillows. He was helpless and fascinated. It wasn't just the buildings – there were boats, stoves, tables, chairs, desks, uncountable other domestic objects. He wanted to see where they would go, couldn't imagine how it would be done.

He came back each day to less. He had given up the Terminación and his room and now slept under a loose sheet hung on branches. His own possessions had been lost. The shutters shivered and disintegrated, the doors fell inwards and the ruin accelerated. Trees sprouted and took root in the walls and floors. These were sketches, outlines of buildings only. The direction of the vegetation moved outwards, from the buildings' interior. He had worried about infiltration, contagion, parasites, but the buildings had erupted from something inherent, burst open from the centre out, blooming in new vegetable cores.

Paint dulled to grey and stripped to nothing. Purple bougainvillea thorn spread throughout the ex-reception of the Terminación. Metal washed out in rain and drifted through the trees and wildflowers. He saw copper tints in new giant ferns, each frond exceeding the height of his body.

He entered what had been the café and stepped through the rotten wooden floor as if into a river. The floor was webbed in larva, worms and purple-black beetles. He dragged his feet forward without raising them and found he dug long, brief lines through the water-wood. The smell was incredible. He would have said he was in the body of something that was changing state. The lifted roofs were vast and uncertain, stretching out to the trees and the canopy.

He saw identical pieces of cloth several miles apart, torn by plant growth, lifted, carried by birds.

He tried to remember what had happened here, specific events that he could tie to concrete places. He looked for correlations between memories and the colossal wild drifts. Evidence of the people in the places they had been. Sometimes, curled in resistance to a storm night or after a couple of hours' sleep late in the day, he would soften and think that the colour and the glow of the new plants were of course directed by the feelings of the people who had lived there. That something had happened with chemistry. He smiled, amazed and consoled, at the purple and the orange excess.

He was still reacting to the changes in his diet. He suffered flux. His thoughts seemed to go on for longer, single ideas stretched out. The sound in the new forest was louder without words. There was less of him and he scouted for parts of the new vegetation reminiscent of his character. He hunted for his loyalty, his lurid sentimentalism, irritability, the blind and contradictory optimism he never understood. Those places, if he found them, may have explained the nature of the substitution, the logic of the depopulation. They would show him where he was going. He searched for the chemistry outside, evidence of his family line and all his memories, stained in the leaves, but the little shelter he had improvised, a kind of nest of ferns that he rolled up in, implied only his shape, despite the hours and hours that he had lain there, dreaming.

Nothing distinguished the buildings from the forest. The world continued. He abandoned sheet and cover. His boots had rotted and splashed off. His body was cut and stained and he was uncertain if some parts were clothed.

He had to twist and cut vines above and below just to move. He couldn't see sky. Nothing was familiar. He had no indication of direction. East and west, interior or coastline. It didn't seem to matter. He ought to have been stunned, he thought.

The repopulation would fail. They had waited too long. Wherever they were, whatever had happened, there was no way of ever coming back. And it was his fault.

Now he dreaded the return. The worst thing that could happen was for the community to attempt to come back. He had cut a thin tunnel east, but the forest filled it every day. There was no way for any of them to come back. He lay listening to all the noises of the night, terrified at the suggestion of slow footsteps, at the thought of their return. Branch ends slicing them, tearing up their clothes and skin. Animals gorging on open wounds. The community, only the faintest trace of life left, crawling through the forest floor, their hair alive, their throats stuffed with earth. Arriving finally at the site, the place where they had lived, they would see that everything had gone. Their space had been removed. There was no room, any longer, for any of them to live.

They would look to him.

It was so stupid of me, he would say, you'll never believe this, but I actually thought you were all gone! You really had me convinced! I don't know how you did it. At first I was sceptical, naturally enough, but after enough time I turned. You really did it. You had me convinced, you know – each of you – that you had gone to the forest and I would never see you again. I'm sorry. I'm really sorry. I know how bad it sounds, how quick I was to turn, to give in. I thought it was just me left. I really thought you were gone, that you would never come back.

I should have been faithful. I should not have turned. It's just that so long had passed, so much time, that I thought I had no other option. All I could see around me was the forest. Even your things had gone. Despite my best efforts to preserve everything, to be a custodian, I was inadequate, and in time everything vanished. The forest reclaimed it all.

What I am about to say is the worst thing I have ever been guilty of. But there came a point, in fact, when I did not want you back. When I dreaded nothing more than your coming back. So much time had passed, you see. I wouldn't know what to say, any more. I wouldn't know what to do. Besides, everything else had gone. The space and the objects. I can't believe I'm saying this.

I used to imagine you coming back, looking for your chair, looking for the table, looking for our bed. And finding nothing was left. Finding there was no room. I would think when I slept under the sheet and heard branches snap that you were coming, looking for space. You were confused, seeing the ruins, seeing how changed and overgrown all this was. I imagined you finally making it through – your face, your skin, your shape all but destroyed by the effort. You approached me. And I was terrified, after all this time.

She put a fingertip to his mouth to quieten him, then turned away, thin blue rags hanging from her last dress. The inspector himself was torn, his hands lapping blood. He was a storm of liquid. His wife crawled away, she did not turn her head back, she moved further into the forest, and he fell.